Other paradigms put too many context switches between my thoughts and the changes I want to see. I do not want to take my hands off the home row to reach the cursor keys, or God forbid the mouse. I also do not want to destroy my pinkie finger with endless usage of modifier keys. So that leaves me with vi (and kakoune).
You can start it in Insert mode and you can have it stay in Insert mode as you run a single command using C-o.
There’s also a plethora of Insert mode ctrl shortcuts which are worth learning in addition to Command mode stuff.
If you’re on the emacs path you'll be able to do all the same stuff, just differently.
The major point is that terminal based software is fully keyboard driven and you can commit the shortcuts to muscle memory and compose them.
As a long time vim user I am in normal mode all of the time. When I sit down at a vim session I haven't touched in a while I press escape a few times to make sure I'm in normal mode. Then while I'm editing I am continuously typing various motion and change commands, some of which enter insert mode, and then quickly making the change before escaping back to normal mode.
Because I am in normal mode all the time (or perhaps vice versa), I spend most of my time jumping around the file and reading what is already there. Extremely rarely am I looking at a completely empty file where the only useful thing to do is start inserting text. And even then I am often typing some command to pull in text from another file or as the result of a bash command.
This is exactly why I switched from emacs to vim, after a couple of decades of emacs use. I decided I'd put up with slow editing for a few days, as I forced myself to use vim. (It was that or not type for a week or so.) After a few days of frustration, vim started to grow on me. Swearing became less frequent.
A month later, I was perhaps 75% as fast in vim as in emacs, and my hand pain had completely vanished.
And a few months after that, I noticed that I was really quite fast in vim -- certainly faster than I was in emacs -- and that the constant puzzle-solving (finding the action that required the fewest keystrokes) was intriguing.
Using emacs seems to me to be an exercise in remembering, whereas using vim is more an exercise in thinking. Part of the appeal is that this thinking does not interfere with the thinking involved in writing. It's a bit like driving a standard car: the extra cognitive demand (do I need to shift now? are the revs right yet? am I at the biting point?) seems to be handled by a different processor, and having that processor working makes the experience more enjoyable.
This. This right here is one of the best characterizations of the vim/emacs debate that I have ever heard.